Action’ Producer Bradley Jackson on the Odds of Texas Legalizing Sports Gambling

Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 law that illegal sports betting in most states (Nevada appreciated an exclusion ). When that happened, the floodgates for legalized sports betting across the nation opened –Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island became the first to allow gambling on the result of a match, but they are not likely to be the final.
Texas-based documentary filmmaker and UT grad Bradley Jackson, who made the surprise hit Dealt, about a blind San Antonio card shark, spent much of the past six months immersed in the world of sports betting due to their follow-up to that undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt director Luke Korem and fellow manufacturer Russell Wayne Groves (in addition to showrunner David Check), Jackson made the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, that monitored the winners and winners of this 2018-19 NFL season–maybe not the ones on the area, but the ones at the match, wagering a small fortune on the results of the matches being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson ahead of the series’ final episode to talk about sports betting, daily dream, and what the chances are that Texas allows fans to put a bet on game day within the next few years.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this project?
Bradley Jackson: How large a company this is. I mean, you see the numbers and they are just astronomical. In the opening paragraph of the series, when we are showing these individuals gambling on the Super Bowl, that just on the Super Bowl alone, I think it’s like six billion bucks. But then the caveat to this stat is that only 3% of that is legal wagering. That means 97 percent of action wagered on the Super Bowl is prohibited. That amount from Super Bowl weekend was among the very first stats that I watched when we were getting into this project, and it blew my mind. Then you examine the actual numbers of how much is really bet in the usa, and it’s billions and billions of dollars–so much of this is illegal wagering. Therefore it feels like it’s one of these things everyone is doing, however, nobody really talks about.
Texas Monthly: Did working on this job inspire you to put any bets?
Bradley Jackson: Yeah. I hadn’t ever done it, and now that I’ve spent six months embedded in this world, I’ve made a few –low-stakes things, simply to find that feeling of what it is like. And it’s fun, especially when you’re wagering a reasonable amount–but the feelings are still there. I’m a really mental person, so when I dropped my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU bet, I felt awful for approximately an hour. Because of course I bet on UT, therefore when OU won, it hurt not just because my team dropped –it hurt even more that I dropped fifty dollars.
Texas Monthly: Can you have a feeling of when placing a wager like that in Texas might be legal?
Bradley JacksonWe are living in a state that is obsessed with sportsfootball especially. And nothing draws people’s attention more than betting on football, especially the NFL. I believe finally Texas can perform some sort of sport gambling. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I think they’ll do it in cellular, because I do not think we’ll see casinos in Texas, ever. I’ve been hearing that maybe Buffalo Wild Wings will do some type of pseudo sports gambling stuff, which means you could go to Buffalo Wild Wings and put on your phone and set a fifty-dollar wager on the Astros, and I think that would be legal one day. Probably sometime in the next five decades.
Texas Monthly: With this industry being enormous, prohibited, and so largely untaxed, to what extent do you believe gambling as a source of untapped revenue for your state plays into matters?
Bradley Jackson: That will play hugely into it. From a monetary point of view, it’s enormous. Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, was kind of on the forefront of the. He wrote an editorial to the New York Times about four years ago where he said we need to take sports gambling out of the shadows and then bring it into the light. And that way you can tax it, which is always great for the countries, but you can also make sure it’s done above board. Once the Texas legislature sniff how much money can be taxed, it is a no-brainer.
Texas Monthly: The illegal bookie that you talk to in the documentary states that legalization does not impact his business. What was that like for you to learn?
Bradley Jackson: It blew me away. When we had been sketching out the characters we wanted to attempt to identify to put in the series, an illegal bookie was definitely at the top of our list. Our assumption was that this is going to hurt them. We thought we were going to find some New Jersey illegal bookie whose bottom line was going to be very hurt by all of this. After we met this man, it was the exact opposite. He was just like,”I am not sweating at all.” I was shocked by it. He did state he thinks that if every state goes, if this becomes 100 percent legal in every state, he then think that he might be affected. However he operates from this Tri-State region, and now it is only legal in New Jersey, and only in four or five spots. He breaks it down really well in the conclusion of our first incident, where he simply says,”It’s convenient and it is charge –both C’s will never go off.” Having an illegal bookie, you can lose fifty thousand dollars on credit, and that can really negatively affect your life. Sometime you can still harm yourself betting legally, but you can not bet on credit through legal channels. If casinos begin letting you wager on credit, I believe his bottom line might get hurt. The more it’s a part of the national conversation, the more money he makes, because people are like,”Oh, it is legal, right?”
Texas Monthly: Is daily dream one of the gateways to sports betting? It feels like it’s just a small variant on traditional gambling.
Bradley Jackson: In Episode 3, we follow one of the top five daily dream players in America. He’s a 26-year-old child. He makes millions of dollars doing this. He told us that the most he’s ever produced was $1.5 million in one week. Among our hypotheses for the series was that the pervasiveness of daily dream was a gateway into the leagues allowing legalized gaming to actually happen. For many years, you noticed the NFL state that sports gambling is the worst thing and they would never allow it. And about four years ago daily fantasy like DraftKings and FanDuel started, and they bought, I think, 30,000 ad spots across the NFL Sunday platform. When you were watching the NFL, every other commercial was DraftKings or FanDuel. And a great deal of people were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say that you think sports gambling is the worst thing ever. How is this not gambling?” It’s gambling. We actually join the CEO of DraftKings, and two of the high-up people at FanDuel, and I think that it’s B.S., but they say daily dream is not gambling, it’s a game of skill. However, I really don’t think that is true.
Texas Monthly: How people who make money do it will involve running substantial quantities of teams to beat the odds, instead of picking the men they believe have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our everyday dream player over a weekend of creating his bets, and he doesn’t do well that weekend. And he spoke about how what he is doing is a lot of skill, but each week there are two or three plays which are completely random, and they either make his week or ruin his week, which is 100 percent luck. This is an element of gaming, because you are putting something of financial worth up with an unknown outcome, and you have no control on how that is awarded. We watch him literally lose sixty thousand dollars on a three-yard run by Ezekiel Elliott. It is the Cowboys-Eagles, and he says,”All I need is to get the Cowboys to perform well, but without Ezekiel Elliott producing any gains, after which you see Zeke get, like, a four-yard pass and he’s like,”If one more of those happens, then I am screwed.” And then there is this little two-yard pass from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,”I simply lost sixty thousand dollars .” And you observe $60,000 jump out of an account. There’s no way that is not gambling.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has argued that daily fantasy is prohibited in Texas. Are there any cultural factors in the country that might make this more difficult to pass, or is some thing similar to that just a way of staking a claim to the money involved?
Bradley Jackson: It could just be the pessimist in me, but believe in the end of the day, a great deal of it just comes down to money. An interesting case study is what occurred in Nevada. In Nevada they made daily dream illegal, which is mad, because gaming is legal in Nevada. But they made it illegal since the daily fantasy leagues would not cover the gambling tax. So it was like a reverse position, in which Nevada said,”Hey, this is betting, so cover the gaming taxes,” and DraftKings and FanDuel were like,”It is not gambling.” And so they didn’t come to Nevada. I don’t think Texas will necessarily do it right off the bat, but I think it in a few years, once they see just how much money there will be produced, and there are clever ways to start it, it’ll happen.

Read more: https://santheplienhop.vn/big-marleys-ufc-227-betting-preview/